Discovering Motherhood

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

It’s a non-milestone year for our
family. No one is graduating this year. None of the four kids is new to his or
her respective school. No one is being adopted, baptized or receiving their
First Communion. Bill and I have been at the same workplaces for about a decade
each, and while we’re thinking of buying a new couch for the family room, we
don’t have any other exciting home-improvement projects on the horizon. He and
I, out for our twenty-first wedding anniversary (another non-milestone year,
when compared to twenty or twenty-five) reflected over dinner how intensely “in
the middle” we are.

“If
only we knew somehow, that this was all going to turn out, this would be so
much easier,” Bill said.

I
understood exactly what he meant. In the early days of marriage, when we were
in our twenties, with pudgy toddlers and early careers, anything was possible.
Age 40 seemed impossibly far off and I couldn’t quite imagine having a child
who could speak in full sentences, let alone one who would actually finish high
school, make it to college and live a couple hundred miles away. Even into our
early thirties, each year brought new possibilities—Bill jumped out of his
marketing career and went back to school to become a teacher; we leapt into
foster care; we built a deck on the back of our house with help from our
still-childless friends and a brochure from Home Depot.

Now,
fifteen years later, having surged past the once far-off age of 40, we are deep
into the family life we began as early-marrieds. With four kids ages 11, 12, 16
and 19, the question marks in our marriage have shifted from ourselves to our
children. Each question has a different child as its center. Will Jacob find a
major that can lead him to meaningful work?Where will Liam go to college? Can our parenting of Teenasia make up for
her difficult early years? What will Jamie’s strong personality look like in
adolescence?

We
are in the middle of parenting and middles are difficult. When I ran cross country
in high school and college, the middle was the most challenging part of the
race. Adrenaline carried me through the first half mile, and sheer will brought
me to the finish, but the middle of the course — with hills and woods and
sometimes streams to jump over-- that was
where the real work was. The middle was filled with tactical decisions—if I
pass now, will she pass me back later? If I pick up speed now, will I have
enough energy to finish? The importance of tactical decisions is true with
parenting in the preteen and teen years, as well. Do we address the messy room
or let it go? If I put more energy into the relationship, will it pay off, or
will I collapse from fatigue? Do I give the second reminder, or allow natural
consequences to prevail?As with cross
country, the middle of the parenting course requires both endurance and faith.
Bill’s question from our dinner is the question of every runner who has passed
the water station but can’t yet see the finish. We know our position now—the question is how
will it affect the outcome? The only way to answer the question is to keep
running hard, keep parenting as well as we are able.

We
are in the middle. We’re sweaty and breathing hard and we’ve got mud splattered
on our legs from the last puddle we couldn’t quite jump over. But we’re running
together, Bill and I, through the middle of our marriage, the middle of our
parenting. If the first half of the race has shown us anything, it’s that we’re
loyal teammates. And as the course veers up a hill or into the woods, we’re
ready for it, because we’ve been training together. Sometimes Bill leads.
Sometimes I do. And sometimes the course is wide enough that we can run side by
side.

Our son Liam, 15, has a jersey he wears over his jacket to
play pond hockey in the winter. On the back is spelled out “Scobacheck,” a nod
to his hyphenated last name of Scobey-Polacheck. More than 20 years ago, before
Liam was even a twinkle in our eyes, his dad and I got engaged and decided that
when we married, we would both hyphenate our names and so would any children
who might come our way. Our decision, made by a couple of 23-year-old
idealists, was made with both intention and reflection, but without detailed
thought to practical issues, such as the fact that a hyphenated name would be
too long to fit on the back of a sports jersey.

At the time
of our marriage, I could not imagine changing my name to Polacheck. I loved the
name Scobey. Something about the two syllables, the “b” in the middle and “y”
at the end made it feel bouncy. Bubbly. Boppy. Happy. “Scobey” was fun, while
“Polacheck” was more serious. Eastern Europe is not known for its zippy,
easy-going last names.

Unlike some
couples who each retained their own names, Bill and I, both English majors with
an affinity for the meaning inherent in word choice, thought a hyphenated name
best represented what we wanted our marriage to be about—the joining of two
lives.

One of the
most immediate gifts that hyphenation offered was experiencing the grace with
which Bill’s parents accepted a decision that they didn’t agree with. The day
after we announced that we would hyphenate, Bill’s mother called to tell him
that she and his father thought this was not a good idea. Bill thanked her for
the call, explained some of our reasons and said we were going to go forward anyway.
His parents never brought it up again. In the 20 years that would follow, every
letter, card and thank-you note they sent was addressed to us using our
hyphenated name. Bill’s parents could have written “Mr. and Mrs. Bill Polacheck”
to make a point, but they chose instead to honor our decision, and in doing so,
they gave us confidence that they trusted us to do what was best for our
relationship and our family, even if it would be a different choice than they
would make for themselves.

Bill and I
believed that if were going to be successful at having a long and unwieldy last
name, we’d need to retain both flexibility and a sense of humor. It didn’t help
that I have a double first name. “Your name is Annemarie Scobey-Polacheck?” I
remember a dad of one of my children’s friends saying, upon our introduction.
“Are you sure that’s just one person?”Bill pointed out that my name had the same number of syllables as John
Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

When we
named our sons, we purposefully chose short, easy first names and skipped a
middle name, knowing they could add a middle name at Confirmation if they
chose. Our biggest complication came upon the adoption of nine-year-old
Teenasia. Teenasia was a difficult first name (her name pronounced ten-asia,
rather than teen-asia, as it is spelled). Bill and I stayed up late in the
weeks leading to her adoption, wondering if we should take the moment of her adoption
to legally change everyone’s name to Polacheck. Finally, we had our friends,
Cliff and Machellé Brown, over for dinner and asked them what they thought. We
thought the Browns, an African American family who had chosen uncomplicated
first names for their own four children, would be able to advise us on whether
it would be unfair to give Teenasia such a unusual last name on top of her
difficult first name. They were incredulous.

“What?”
Cliff said, putting down his fork. “You are the Scobey-Polachecks. That’s who
you are. That’s who Teenasia will be. She’ll handle it. It will be fine.”

Teenasia
herself declared her commitment to the name by proudly writing it in bubble
letters on her school folders once she was adopted. She has since stated, amid
Jacob’s discussion of dropping a name, that she plans to be hyphenated forever.

Twenty years
after our decision to hyphenate, I still have mixed feelings about it.
Sometimes, when I tell a new person my last name, I apologetically add, “It
seemed like a good idea at the time. We were very young when we got
married.”But overall, I have felt that
our name suits us so well — it’s complicated, yet balanced — our very own
brand. Hyphenation is our imperfect solution to a difficult question of
identity, custom and why the male’s family name trumps. Each of our children
will need to take their name into adulthood and make their own choices going
forward. And like Bill’s parents before us, Bill and I will trust our children
to follow their hearts as they make their decisions. And that’s a family
tradition we’re proud to carry on.

Yoga: Lessons from the mat

March, 2014

When I was a little girl, I
failed beginning gymnastics three times. I loved the idea of gymnastics—the way
I saw the other girls float in the air doing their flips and handstands. The
problem was I couldn’t get my legs far enough apart to do the straddle roll; I
could not walk across the balance beam; I could not even touch my toes. So
eventually, when I was about a head taller than any others in the beginner
class, I stopped going.

In
high school, I found a sport that required neither flexibility nor upper arm
strength—distance running. My too-long legs served me well and my non-muscular
frame was actually very light to carry around for any given distance, providing
me with an advantage in terms of endurance. No one asked me to touch my toes as
I passed them in the final mile. My competitive running career ended in college,
and recreational running took its place. For the past twenty years, aside from
an occasional pick-up volleyball game or a bike ride, running is the only
exercise I have done. Running is free and convenient, and I had never given
thought to augmenting my almost-daily run with another form of exercise.

Until
now. As part of an uncharacteristic New Year’s resolution, I decided to join a
yoga class held over the lunch hour at my workplace. Yoga, I read, had similar
benefits to meditation in terms of producing inner strength and peace. By the
end of 2014, three of my four children will be teenagers. I decided that this
year, I would need all the inner strength and peace available to me.

So,
dressed in my running shoes, tights and a free t-shirt from a local fun run, I
arrived at my first yoga class. The instructor played soft, soothing music as
everyone sat serene, barefoot and cross-legged on his or her mats. I suddenly
realized that yoga is done without shoes. Struggling to sit cross-legged, with
my knees closer to my ears than to the mat, I had a sudden flashback to my childhood
days of failed gymnastics. As my colleagues breathed deeply around me, I concentrated
on not rearranging my burning legs and wondered when we would move onto
something easier.

The
rest of the class was a series of impossible poses. While the employees in the
class had differing levels of bendability, strength and skill, each one of them
could do a version of the demonstrated pose. Except me. With a mixture of embarrassment
and horror, I realized I could not do even the most basic yoga pose properly.
The more complicated poses looked to me like something out of Cirque du Soleil.
I was so much more noticeably inflexible than anyone else in the class that the
teacher approached as I was straining toward my toes, fingertips a foot off the
floor, and whispered to me, “Runners have tight hamstrings. It’s okay.” I had
never told her I was a runner. I wanted to fold up my mat and simply watch the
class and applaud at appropriate times.

But
I kept going back to yoga, partly because Karen, a co-worker two cubes down
attended each lunchtime session and would ask me if I was coming with her.
Karen is as flexible as a warm soft pretzel.When she bends over in the triangle pose, her hair grazes the mat. My own
triangle pose looks more like a rhombus.

As
I showed up for yoga every other day, it got a little better. Not because I
could do any of the poses, but because the instructor recognized that I was a
special needs yoga person and began to bring me props—like a foam brick to put
under my bottom while we did “Pigeon” or a long strap to attach to my feet and
hold onto while we rocked on our backs in what they called “Happy Baby,” but
felt to me more like “Cranky Toddler.”

At
home, my family delighted in my stories of my challenging yoga classes. I would
explain a terribly complicated pose, and Jamie and Teenasia, ages 10 and 12,
would immediately enter the pose on our kitchen floor and hold it for a minute
before collapsing in giggles that I could not do it. Liam, 15, who inherited my
non-flexibility, was more sympathetic, and suggested I just stick to running.

But
even as I measure my improvements in yoga in millimeters and nanoseconds, yoga
is bringing me a gift that I had not expected. I am realizing, as I show up to
yoga class, that yoga is making me more compassionate towards my children and
their individual struggles. Childhood is a series of new and sometimes
seemingly impossible tasks. From sitting still in church to complex word problems
in math to managing emotions at home, each day Bill and I expect our children
to try their best at tasks that may not come naturally. How often do we expect
the same of ourselves? Adulthood brings the luxury of choosing comfort over challenge.
I stay with my job because I’m successful at it; my home life and activities
outside of work are usually within my reach. Yoga is different. Tipping over in
the “Tree” pose as the rest of my classmates stand motionless reminds me that
this may be how my daughter feels when she’s unable to do something than most
kids consider simple. Yoga has made it possible for me to be kinder to my children
when they flounder.

So,
for now at least, I’m continuing my yoga classes. I’m awkward and stiff and not
graceful at all. During the class I feel
frustrated and wonder when it will be over. I’m doing something new and
different and it’s so difficult. And I’m so thankful.

On a camping trip this past
summer, I was sitting around the fire with some friends after the kids had gone
to bed, and someone brought up how different regions of the United States have
their own culture and personality. I commented that even though I had lived in
Milwaukee almost my whole life, I didn’t think there was anything about me that
was especially Midwestern. This caused my friend Frank, who was born and raised
in Texas, went to Georgetown for college, lived out East and then moved to
Wisconsin, to burst out laughing.

“You are so incredibly Midwestern, you have no idea,” he
said. “Everything about you is Midwestern. We could drop you anywhere in the
U.S. and within 15 minutes, anyone who has traveled to any degree at all would
identify you as Midwestern.”

When I pressed him about what made me so obviously Midwestern,
Frank said it wasn’t one thing—it was a thousand subtle things— from my make-up
(or lack there of), to my values, to how I dressed, to what I cooked, to what I
chose to talk about.

“It’s not bad that you’re easy to identify,” Frank
finally said, no doubt exhausted from all my questions and unable to find a
polite way to tell me I was not nearly as sophisticated as I fancied myself.
“We’re all products of our culture.”

Webster Merriman
defines culture as a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a
place or organization. If I am recognizably
Midwestern (as I have come to accept), am I also perceptibly Catholic? What
does it mean to think, behave or work as a Catholic so much that you are
recognized as such?

Within the organization of the Catholic Church, those who
have positions of leadership define what it means to be culturally Catholic — what
it means to think, behave and work as a
Catholic. Those of us who sit in the pews or whose children attend Catholic
schools absorb the messages of the leadership — sometimes without even
realizing it — and think, behave and work accordingly. The baby boomer jokes
about “Catholic guilt” came from a pre-Vatican II Catholic cultural emphasis on
sin. Today’s Gen X and Y Catholics, now in our 30s and 40s don’t carry the same
type of Catholic guilt that our parents do. By the time we came along, Catholic
leadership had changed direction, giving less emphasis to sin, and more to
community, reconciliation and peace.

Pope Francis’ focus on the poor is defining our current Catholic
culture, pulling us rightfully back to our roots — to Jesus, who said nothing
about Canon law or establishment of a church hierarchy, and everything about
loving our neighbor and helping the marginalized. Pope Francis, by repeatedly
speaking of service to the poor; of more equal redistribution of wealth; of the
protection of the most vulnerable, is defining the culture of Catholicism. To
be Catholic, Pope Francis says with both his words and his actions, is to allow
our faith to propel us to serve those who are in need. “Let us never forget that authentic power is service,” he said
in one of his first homilies as Pope, “and that the Pope too, when exercising
power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant
culmination on the Cross.”

Just
four months into his papacy, Pope Francis was dubbed the “slum Pope” for his
work with the poor and a visit to the shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro. On World
Youth Day, he urged young Catholics to make a “mess” of their dioceses by
taking their faith to the streets. "I want to see the church get closer to
the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves
off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these
need to get out!" Pope Francis said.

As
Pope Francis outlines what it means for us to be Catholic; as he calls us back
to our most basic mission of joyful service to the poor, I pray that our
cardinals, our bishops, our priests, our sisters, our parish council members
and all Catholic leaders will understand and absorb his message and bring it to
their dioceses and parishes; to their Catholic schools and institutions. Culture
change within any organization begins at the top, but in order for the world’s
1.18 billion Catholics to lift up the poor, give voice to the voiceless and
truly build the kingdom as Jesus intends, we are going to need our local
Catholic leaders to cascade the Pope’s message—through both words and action. As
bright and beautiful as this Pope is, he cannot help the poor alone— and he
needs us to understand that it is not he who is calling us to change the
culture of our church. It is Christ.

I love my iPhone. I love the ping of an incoming e-mail and
the double ping of an incoming text. I love how it keeps me in relationship
with two of my friends who each live 100 miles away. I love how it’s allowed me
to answer questions from work while laying on the beach and field questions
from our kitchen while I am finishing up at work. I love how I can take photos
and quickly send them to grandparents, friends or Jacob, away at college. My phone keeps me closely connected to all the
people who matter most to me. I rarely go anywhere without my smart phone.

And my
strong positive feelings about my phone are precisely why neither of my
daughters—ages 10 and 12—will get a phone anytime soon. My strong positive feelings
are why my two sons—ages 15 and 18—had to wait until eighth grade and freshman
year of high school respectively, to get their own non-smart, no keyboard flip
phone. They had to wait even longer for Facebook accounts.

Managing my
phone has little to do with managing technology and everything to do with
managing relationships. I treasure my relationships, and I know this is why I
have such fond feelings for my phone. It’s like carrying all the people I love (plus
those I work with) around in my purse and having access to them all the time. I
have no doubt my girls would feel similarly attached to their phones, if they
had them. But Bill and I believe that for children in grade school, primary
relationship efforts need to go toward family members, not friends. Our daughters
need to build a strong connection first and foremost with my husband and me. Our voices and values need to be loud and
clear now because our time at center stage is limited—high school brings with
it less time with the family and more time with friends, and more potential to
move away from what we’ve spent all childhood teaching. Every minute texting a
friend is a minute not spent being present to the people in the home. We’ve got
about thirty months with Teenasia and fifty-four with Jamie to help them become
so deeply the girls that God means for them to be that they will be strong
enough to hold to their true selves, even in the face of high school peer
pressure. I am happy to share these final months before the teen years with my
girls’ friends—through playdates, activities, sports and church. But we will
not give our girls away to unsupervised time of texting or online social
networks.

A phone
that allows instant and constant access to friends and acquaintances requires
the phone’s owner to have both wisdom and self-discipline, neither of which
exactly run rampant among the grade school set. For middle-school girls, gossip
is a constant lure as children jockey for social position within a class. I was
a middle school girl once myself, and I still remember my horror when my
seventh grade teacher intercepted a snarky note I tossed to my friend about
another girl. I am still embarrassed about my unkind words about that girl and
am thankful that the teacher ripped up the note, so that the girl would never
know what I said about her. But a note from a 12-year-old today, written not on
a scrap of paper, but texted impulsively, could be repeatedly forwarded and
cause hurt beyond anything that was possible before. Our girls need to be
protected from themselves. They do not need any device that makes it even
easier to compare themselves with others; to gossip; to move up or down in the
social hierarchy of the class. Girls will find enough ways to do this on their
own. They do not need a phone more advanced than the computers that took men to
the moon to help them with their clique-development.

In a
friend’s daughter’s sixth grade class last year, Instagram was all the rage.
Instagram describes itself as “A fast, beautiful, fun way to share photos with
family and friends.” But boys in the class were using it to send inappropriate
photos and girls were using it to take pictures of gatherings where other girls
weren’t invited. The parents eventually found out and most took the app away
from their children’s phones, but the damage had been done.

Studies
show that both adults and children will say things online or in texts that they
would not have the courage to say out loud, in person. In an article in the Wall Street Journal,Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor, explains it this way: “We're less inhibited online
because we don't have to see the reaction of the person we're addressing.
Because it's harder to see and focus on what we have in common, we tend to
dehumanize each other.”

We
are in our infancy as a society in learning how to manage advancing personal
technology. Just as it took numerous fatal automobile accidents in the early
twentieth century before society caught on that drivers should need to go
through a licensing process, and even longer before sixteen was chosen as the
minimum age to drive, so it will be with today’s children, phones and online access.
As a society, we will likely need to live through a generation of children
damaged by texting and risky online behavior before we understand the true
danger. Perhaps when this generation of children grows up, they will look back
on 2013 and say to their own children. “Can you imagine—I grew up back when
parents still gave phones to 10-year-olds?”

The
parents holding out now will be shown to have been ahead of our time.

About Me

Annemarie writes locally and nationally on foster care, adoption, parenting and spirituality. She is responsible for the content in At Home with Our Faith (circulation 80,000), which has won the First Place award in its category from the Associated Church Press for three consecutive years. Her Training Wheels column has appeared in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald since 2002 and most of these blogs appeared first in her Training Wheels column or as a chapter of her book, Discovering Motherhood (Ambassador Press, 2006). She is married to Bill, with four children (two biological, two adopted), and works in a job-share position at Johnson Controls as director of Corporate Programs in Diversity and Public Affairs.